NAS Advice

[bluesman]

I’m amazed at how few audiophiles think the cost of cloud backup is too high to justify, in view of the things on which far more money is spent with (IMO) far less return.  After accidentally losing an irreplaceable folder of photos despite on site HD backup about 8 years ago (it was my own fault), I found a great backup called Livedrive and have slept better ever since. It’s truly unlimited and you can add network storage units for a reasonable additional cost.  

There are several excellent cloud backup services. You can even set up an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket and back up to that for very little money.  Most good NAS units have external automated incremental backup capability to do this.  Depending on your internet speeds, it can take a while to upload your library - my NAS originally took about 3 days(!) for almost 2 TB over the basic Comcast business plan when I first set this up. Restoration is much quicker for most, as download speeds are usually much faster than upload on the majority of plans around here.

 

I also “rebuild” fresh HDs every year and put them away so I can pop them in if necessary.  I just bought an Asustor 5202 to try as an entry level Roon server.  Using a 240G USB3 SSD for Roon, it works great until pushed beyond its processing power and memory (limited to a max of 8 gigs) with multiple DSP tasks on high res files.
 

I’m preparing a review and comparison of value-oriented NAS, including a Raspberry Pi based Open Media Vault, a NUC based OMV, a Chromebox based OMV (running Ubuntu 20), a Pi based Samba NAS, and my Asustor (the lowest performance NAS I could find that will run Roon).

[bluesman]

On 6/17/2020 at 8:56 PM, robbbby said:

So now, how the heck do I store all the data from those 5 disks, so that I can put the disks into the NAS to be formatted to create a raid 5 array, and then move all the data back.

Been there, hated it, bit the bullet, lived to tell about it. I simply bought enough inexpensive HD space to hold the files and copied them to it.  An 8TB Seagate is about $150, and you can fill it with FLACs in a day or two with an i3 or better.  Of course, you then have to move them onto your new NAS. But you can listen to them while copying and you can listen to web radio or streams while rebuilding the NAS.

 

I didn’t even bother with FTP.  It’s a little slower than http for small files and a bit faster for big ones (or at least it was when I last used it a few years ago).  Rsync and some other file transfer methods are said to be quick, but the ones I know only run on Linux. I got more patient after the first 24 hours...........